The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 23 of 32

Wake with the others and cook Day 6 breakfast as the stations rotate again. its today eggs and sasuge sandwiches. after eating, yall start to feel wired in your normal clothes and feel the need to change as everyone's hair starts to show in the food.

Day 6 opens on the same shared breath, twelve 'mornin', hon's in the dark, and the walk-in already has the eggs and sausage pulled for the morning. The wheel turns another notch: the cooks fetch, the fetchers serve, and you find yourself back on the cooking line with three of you, cracking eggs onto the griddle in even rows while the sausage patties sizzle alongside. English muffins toast by the dozen, cheese lays down square, and the kitchen fills with the smell of butter and breakfast the way it ought to. You fold the eggs soft, lay the sausage, cap it with the muffin top, and the sandwiches come out even as scripture.

The line serves twelve plates the same — one sandwich each, a little cup of fruit beside — and you eat together at the long table, warm and full, and it tastes like the good years. 'Fourth-graders love a hand-held, hon,' Tammy says, and the table hums agreement, and it is very good.

But halfway through the meal something starts working at you. Your collar itches. The jeans bind wrong across your belly, the windbreaker hangs stiff where it ought to hang soft, and you shift in your seat and so do eleven others, all of you tugging hems, all of you restless in your own clothes. A grey hair drops from your knot into your sandwich, and you look at it and think, well, that won't do — a hair in the food, at her station. Tammy across the table is picking one from her own plate with a pursed lip, and Tammy beside you tucks loose strands back with a hand that isn't satisfied, and the whole table has gone quiet with the same small discomfort.

'These clothes ain't right for serving in,' Tammy says at last, and it lands like the truest thing said all week. The blue dresses come to you unbidden — pressed and waiting, white aprons over them, hairnets to catch every stray grey hair, the whole set of it back behind the serving line where it has waited all this time for a morning just like this one. 'We ought to change,' you say, and the table rises as one, twelve napkins laid beside twelve cleared plates, and the wheel carries you toward the hidden room together.